Why Is U.S. Violent Crime Declining? (Part 2): Jeffrey Goldberg

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) -- In the mid-1990s, even as crime
rates across the U.S. were falling, a group of prominent
criminologists and sociologists came along with the intention of
scaring the hell out of us.

Don’t be fooled by this downturn in violence, they said.
Something much worse is coming -- the “superpredators,” a group
of children who, in 10 years, would grow into the most murderous
cohort of teenagers the country had seen.

This is how Time magazine portrayed the problem in January
1996: “They are growing up, too frequently, in abusive or broken
homes, with little adult supervision and few positive role
models. Left to themselves, they spend much of their time
hanging out on the streets or soaking up violent TV shows.”

Although the crime rate was dropping for adults, the
article added, it was soaring for teens, a population that would
soon be booming. It then quotes the esteemed criminologist James
Alan Fox, who says: “This is the calm before the crime storm. So
long as we fool ourselves in thinking we’re winning the war
against crime, we may be blindsided by this bloodbath of teenage
violence that is lurking in the future.”

Well, the future came, and no, you didn’t somehow miss the
“bloodbath of teenage violence.” Because it didn’t happen. Crime
rates continued to fall through the first decade of the new
millennium, and continue to fall today. In the city whose crime
patterns I know best, Washington, D.C., the homicide rate --
perhaps the most important single marker of civilization’s
advance or retreat -- is dropping through the floor.

Unpredictable Trajectory

In 1991, 479 people were murdered in a city whose
population was about 500,000. Last year, 108 people were killed
in a city whose population has topped 600,000. Washington’s
mayor, Vincent Gray, told me he attributes the city’s population
growth -- D.C. has added 17,000 people in the past 15 months --
in large part to the precipitous drop in violent crime. “This is
not a trajectory anyone could have predicted,” he said.

The rate of decline in violent crime is uneven across the
country. Some cities, such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, are
having much more difficulty reducing their homicide rates than
Washington or New York. But no city has seen the burst of
violence that was forecast in the 1990s. The obvious question
is, Why didn’t these ostensibly vicious youth turn to violent
crime in large numbers?

Not long ago, I visited Washington’s police chief, Cathy
Lanier, in her office to discuss the city’s seemingly miraculous
turnaround, and asked her why she thought the homicide rate was
cratering. She listed a number of broad trends, including
economic development, which pushed crime out of Washington’s
downtown and toward the periphery (and over the city’s eastern
border with Prince George’s County, Maryland), and the waning of
the crack epidemic. It was crack that fueled the drug wars of
the late 1980s and early 1990s, and crack that took apart so
many families.

Other police chiefs, and criminologists, have attributed
the broad declines in violence to an assortment of other trends.
The decline in lead levels in young people, brought about by the
banning of leaded gasoline in the 1970s, is sometimes cited by
public-health officials. So, too, is the discovery that so-called crack babies weren’t nearly as affected by their mothers’
addiction as was originally feared.

America’s high rate of incarceration is often credited as
well. Charles Murray, the political scientist and author, argues
that “higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100
percent of the reduction in violent crime.” James Q. Wilson, a
professor at Pepperdine University, argues more modestly that
incarceration is responsible for perhaps 25 percent to 30
percent of the reduction.

Controversial Argument

Then there’s the controversial argument, advanced most
famously by the economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue, that
legalized abortion curtailed the number of unwanted babies, who
would have presumably grown up unloved, maladjusted and prone to
violence.

But those theories don’t fully account for actual policing.
Lanier outlined some of the changes in the way her department
does its job -- procedural, technological and investigative
changes that I suspect have more to do with the drop in
homicides than sociologists might credit. She talked about the
frustration she felt, first as a patrol officer then as a
midlevel commander, when good ideas were ignored.

“Every time I took a promotional test, I would have that
many less idiots to listen to, and I would try to fix the things
that I thought were bad. As chief, I get the chance to fix the
things that aggravated me my whole career. I have watched chief
after chief implement strategies that someone else brought here
without consideration for whether the strategy fits our specific
crime problem.”

Early in her tenure, for instance, she rejected the
philosophy of “zero-tolerance” law enforcement. “When you do
zero-tolerance and flood neighborhoods with violent crime with
cops and you lock up everybody for the most minor violations,
the 45-year-old woman sitting on her stoop drinking beer, you
make people think you’re an occupying army locking up good
people and leaving behind the thugs,” she said.

“We tried to flip that the other way. Arresting people is
not a measure of success. Less crime is a measure of success. We
put beat people on the streets, handing out business cards with
their cell numbers, BlackBerry numbers, and told them to call if
they needed anything. After a shooting people don’t want to talk
to an officer on the street, but they will call.”

Ending Retaliation

The goal, largely achieved, was to convince residents of
high-crime neighborhoods that the police weren’t the enemy.
This, Lanier said, brought the police closer to their ultimate
goal of quickly inserting themselves into the retaliatory cycle
that begins after each homicide. As many as 60 percent of last
year’s murders, she told me, were committed in retaliation for
earlier killings. Homicide detectives are making arrests much
faster these days, thanks to better street-level intelligence.
In 2007, the average D.C. homicide investigation was closed in
52 days; by 2011 that number had been halved. Many of the
arrests grow out of an anonymous tip line Lanier established.

“In 2008, we got 292 tips,” she said. “By 2011 we were at
over 1,200, and you would not believe the detailed tips we get.
People are trusting us now much more.”

She went on, “As soon as a victim is shot, we want the
name, within the hour, to go to the analysts, and then the gang
intelligence unit will see if he’s a validated gang member and
then we’ll get a work-up on his prior arrests, who his co-defendants were, what arrests happened in the last 30 days, and
that will all go to the homicide detectives who are then making
arrests before retaliation kicks in.”

Lanier believes that smart policing can drive D.C.’s
homicide number below 50 a year. “We want zero, of course, and
there’s no reason that advanced, intelligent policing can’t
intervene and make this situation better than it is even now.”

Zero homicides in a city of 600,000 seems like an
impossibility. But so too did the notion that Washington’s
homicide rate would ever drop at all. Sweeping and unpredicted
change has much to do with this astonishing drop. But so, too,
does Lanier’s police department. Which proves, if nothing else,
that government is still capable of doing some things right.

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for The Atlantic. The opinions expressed
are his own. Read Part 1.)